Correcting the Internet with Mrs. Teacher: Parts of Speech

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Parts of Speech

Today we're going to look at parts of speech. If you've ever been to school, this is a review for you. But I can't talk to you about the complexities of language until I remind you of the basics.

First we've got the noun. 

Click to go to Merriam-Webster's definition of "noun"

A noun is a word that is the name of something. It can be a...

Person

Animal

Place

Thing

Quality

Idea

Action

So... teacher is a noun. That's me; I'm a person. And cat is a noun, obviously, a cat is an animal. Mexico is a noun. It's a proper noun, because it's the actual name of a place. Banana is a noun; it's a thing. Excitement is a noun, a quality of every English student, right? Existentialism is a noun. It's an idea which you'll find out more about when you read Camus. And finally, shopping is a noun. What did you do yesterday? I went shopping.

Did you know that nouns are usually the first parts of speech that babies use? 

So the next important part of speech is the verb.

Click to go to Merriam-Webster's definition of "verb."

You know a verb is an action word, like run or eat. Don't forget to be is also a verb; it expresses a state of being. And have is also a verb. There's no actual action, like run, but it expresses an occurrence.

 So now that we have nouns and verbs, we can make sentences. All you need for a sentence is two words: a noun and a verb.

Yes, this is a sentence.

This is a really short, but perfectly legit sentence:

Now we can pad it out with some other parts of speech.

You've got your adjectives, used to describe nouns:

You've got your adverbs, used to describe verbs :

And you've got your pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, and articles. 

pronoun

preposition

conjunction

interjection

article

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